Martin Lab research summary

“It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation, which is truly the most important time in your life.”

Lewis Wolpert

To form a complex organ, simple tissues must be folded, stretched, compressed, and otherwise sculpted into a precise form in a process called tissue morphogenesis. One of the most dramatic examples of tissue morphogenesis occurs during embryonic development, when primitive planar tissues are folded to generate separate layers that will give rise to different parts of the body during gastrulation. Tissue morphogenesis requires that cytoskeletal machines generate forces that change cell shape and deform the tissue. The molecular mechanism by which the cytoskeleton generates force is not known for many of the diverse cell shape changes and tissue movements that underlie morphogenesis. Furthermore, how force generation by hundreds or thousands of cells is coordinated by biochemical and mechanical signals in a tissue is an important step to understand how cells collectively deform a tissue.

The Martin lab is interested in how tissues get their shape. Given that tissue morphogenesis fundamentally involves movement, we have developed a system to visualize and quantify the dynamics of molecules, cells, and tissues during gastrulation. We focus on mesoderm invagination in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, because cell shape changes and cytoskeletal dynamics can be readily imaged by confocal microscopy during a process that occurs on the time scale of minutes. Live imaging can be combined with genetic (mutants, RNAi), cell biological (drug injections), computational (image segmentation and analysis), biophysical (laser cutting), and biochemical (complex purification) approaches to functionally dissect cell shape change in the embryo.

Recent News

Hannah publishes WIREs Developmental Biology review | Sept'18

Congratulations to postdoc, Hannah Yevick, for publishing her review of approaches to quantify cell and cytoskeletal morphology. Read the review.

Welcome new lab members | Sept'18

We have a number of new additions to the lab including postdocs Jasmin Imran Alsous and Nat Clarke, graduate students Anna Yeh and Jaclyn Camuglia, undergraduates Prateek Kalakuntla and Jennifer Nwako, and technician Vardges Tserunyan.

Natalie publishes Development review | Nov‘17

Congratulations to graduate student, Natalie Heer, for publishing her review article in Development. Natalie contributed to the special issue celebrating the 100th anniversary of "On Growth and Form." Her review article describes the latest research explaining how forces are generated to sculpt tissues.

Soline publishes Curr. Bio. Paper | Nov'17

Congratulations to Soline on publishing her work in Current Biology. Soline showed how mitotic cell rounding is critical to orient cell division such that both daughter cells remain in the tissue. Read the paper.

Cells tear apart from each other in adherens junction mutants, leaving membrane tethers; establishing the critical role of adherens junctions in transmitting contractile forces across the tissue. Image / Adam Martin